Chipmaker improves its global data center asset management with RFID technology

A Fortune 500 computer product developer with a market value of US$50 billion uses RFID tags to manage its 17 data centers around the world.

The company's project manager has led the RFID tracking and management of more than 900 computer rooms around the world, involving 60,000 IT Assets. He shared his experience and suggestions on successfully deploying RFID to data center management.

He told us: “Before using RFID, the accuracy of our IT asset database was very poor. We only had 70% to 80% of regional information, and our location accuracy was even worse.

Previously, the company used paper forms and barcode readers to track IT assets by facility. The entire process is time-consuming and does not allow for a complete asset audit. Accordingly, the company audits only 10% of the assets in any given data center each quarter and then extrapolates the results into inventory reporting.

The RFID system has greatly reduced inventory time, the company can now identify all of its assets (instead of 10% of the sample), and can conduct audits more frequently to keep the data in a continuously updated state.

"The inventory is almost instantaneous, and the time to complete the inventory of the entire computer room using RFID is less than the 10% time required to manually count the inventory. More importantly, the accuracy of our asset database reaches 99%."

1. Follow best practices

There are many RFID success stories in IT ASSET MANAGEMENT. Learn from them and don’t repeat the same mistakes. Partner with experienced solution providers and follow best practices and recommendations created by reputable industry associations such as FSTC (Financial Services Technology Council).

Training is critical for best practices to be adopted throughout the organization. When the project manager visited the company's data center, he discovered that workers were using handheld RFID Readers just slightly differently, but could be significantly more productive. After watching a colleague take 5 minutes to inventory a computer room, the project manager demonstrated how to quickly complete it in 30 seconds.

2. Be prepared to receive more information and data

Helped this Fortune 100 company to find more assets and capture complete information about each asset.

Now that the inventory counting process is so fast and requires less labor time, the company can conduct audits more frequently. Based on the above summary, more data is logged to databases and software applications. Older systems are often not equipped to handle the huge volumes of data provided by IT systems, so planning, testing and integration are crucial

3. Choose appropriate labels carefully

Before making a selection, the project manager evaluated numerous tags from multiple vendors. He views tag size and sensitivity as the most important attributes for IT asset tracking management.

“Some tags have larger antennas, so you can read them from further away. However, this is not what is needed in a data center because when you are reading a rack, you don’t want to be reading four other racks at the same time. Information. The system is going to allow me to know exactly where the assets are in the computer room. In a large data center, I can lock a server to a rack in 77 seconds; it used to take 5 minutes.”

After thorough research, the company selected RFID-resistant metal tags that comply with EPC Global Gen 2 and FSTC standards and can be tuned for optimal performance in data centers around the world. This tag delivers outstanding performance and accuracy even when performing inventory counts in a computer room with thousands of tagged assets with virtually no space between them.

"The labels are minimal, and they were willing to work with us to tune the labels so we could get exactly the information we needed. We needed that size and flexibility to make this work."

4.Think carefully

Project managers now plan to get more value from RFID technology through innovation so that more assets can be tracked and tracked throughout their entire life cycle.

Looking beyond the office or data center, RFID labels and other innovative products are making tracking smartphones and other mobile assets feasible. Innovation also comes from services, and now the company is taking advantage of source tagging, with all new equipment purchased from its IT suppliers already pre-deployed with RFID tags.